Mrs. Ted Bliss

by Stanley Elkin

  She thought of the light Frank had installed on the phone in her bedroom. She thought of all the people she’d missed who said there’d been no answer when they pressed on her buzzer. Not so many. Maybe not so many who said that they had.

  “It’s a good thing I came over,” Junior said. “We would have missed this, whatever it is.” He took up his position again over the hole he had dug in the sand. “Wait,” he said, “I think I just heard the shovel clink against something solid. Give me a second here.”

  Dorothy watched as Junior Yellin moved the shovel aside and reached his arm deep into the hole, almost as far as his shoulder. “My hand is on it,” he said, making no sound but moving his lips. Before he pulled it out he looked over at Dorothy, staring at her, she thought, almost murderously. “This is a fifty-fifty arrangement, you understand. I mean by actual legal rights it probably ought to be sixty-forty, but I’m bringing you into it because you’re my friend, you staked the claim, and it was your machine even though you missed it and I ended up having to do all the work.”

  She watched him carefully.

  “What do you say, Dorothy? Shake?”

  She couldn’t believe this son of a bitch, but thinking again how long he’d survive her and wishing him only the saddest, dreariest memories, she put her hand out slowly and slipped it into his. Junior smiled. “Done? All right then, done. A deal’s a deal!” he said triumphantly. “So let’s see what we got here.”

  He jerked his hand away as if he’d been stung. “Jesus! Son of a bitch! I think I cut myself.” His knuckles and fingers were covered with wet, compacted sand, almost the texture and color of mud. “Can you see, am I bleeding?”

  “I don’t see any blood.”

  “Some of this buried shit can be jagged, sharp. That’s why they say to wear gloves. You could get a very ancient strain of tetanus. No,” Yellin said, “I don’t see any blood either. I was lucky. That stuff can be a bitch to cure. More painful than rabies shots, they say.”

  Mrs. Bliss nodded.

  “Think I could use your scarf to wrap around my hand?”

  “You give me fifty-five.”

  “Ri-i-ght,” Yellin said. “There’s life in the old girl yet, hey Dorothy?” He winked. “Okay,” he said, and reached down into the hole again. “He stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a—Jesus, Mary, and Joe,” he said. “What do you suppose this is?”

  Hand over hand he drew more of it up.

  The metal had lost definition. It was corroded, discolored, had been transmuted, undergone some heavily inverted oxidation by age and weight and water. Vaguely, pieces resembled figure eights, others, enormous, indistinguishable lumps of wadded gray chewing gum. Mrs. Bliss, who’d never seen anything like it, recognized it at once.

  “They’re shackles,” she said. “For slaves. Shipped over from the islands.”

  “Jesus, you think?”

  “Shackles. Handcuffs. Neck rings and leg irons.”

  “For shvartzers?”

  Mrs. Bliss looked at this Junior Yellin. “For the doorman. For the girl who comes to clean once a week. For the man who brings the car around.”

  “Escaped? You think maybe escaped? I mean we’re a little too south of plantation country. They couldn’t have been tobacco and cotton niggers, do you suppose?”

  “There’s storms,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Ships founder and sink. Rocks scrape their sides and they go down.”

  “Absolutely,” Junior Yellin said. “I agree with you, but how do you think—”

  “Bodies bloat. They decay. Death puffs them up and lets out their air like leaky balloons. Elements—seawater, the air—chip away at their skin like tapeworms. They melt. Fat lets go. Bones do. And gasses.” The sun! she thought. “Then what’s left to hold them?” Mrs. Bliss pointed to the sordid cache at their feet. “This iron? They slip these useless nooses like Houdinis.”

  “Yeah,” Junior said, “I guess so. We write that up on the little cards. We do the whole megillah. Dramatic, hard-hitting. They come away with something to think about. Yeah,” he said, “yeah.

  “I think this introduces a whole new dimension,” Yellin said. “ ‘Smuggler’s Museum’ won’t work anymore. Or ‘Dope Runner’s Museum’ either. We’ve got to change it to something more universal. ‘South Florida Museum of Havoc and History’? It needs work. Nothing’s written in stone. But in the ballpark. Think about it. You have a gift for this particular aspect.”

  Mrs. Bliss shook her head.

  “What?”

  “I haven’t got the bells and whistles for this work,” she said.

  “Oh, come on,” Junior said, “sure you do. You do. You’re the brains of the outfit.”

  Mrs. Bliss found it difficult to look at him. The same poisons that radiated from the sun seemed to pour from his eyes.

  “I get it,” Junior said, “you think maybe this is some soft soap I’m handing you. You’re knocking it back to what I said about partners. You probably put that down in case I need someone to help take the load off if I screw up. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.”

  “Will you tell me something?” Mrs. Bliss said.

  “Will I tell you something? Will I tell you something? Of course, sweetie. What have I got to hide? We’re old friends. We know each other our whole lives practically. Ask me something, I’ll tell you something.”

  She pointed up the beach to where he’d left the dune buggy.

  “Where,” she said, “do you get those things? Who gives them to you? All those Frank Buck motorcars you ride around in?”

  He seemed flustered, humiliated. Then he was angry.

  “All those…What, you think it’s all up with me?” he shot back. “That it’s all over but the shouting? You think that ATV shit is too sporty for a guy like me? Listen, you. I’m a character, I’m colorful. All my life I’m a heartbreaker. My wife, the ladies, my daddy, the kids. My partners. Ask Ted, olov hasholem, you don’t believe me. They held their breath to see where I’d jump next, to see where I’d land. I’m in the air now!”

  “Where, Junior?”

  “You see?” he exulted.

  “No. Where? I mean who gives them to you? What strange lies do you have to tell them?”

  Junior Yellin glared at Mrs. Ted Bliss. He held her eyes. Unmoved, she stared back at him. It was an old game she remembered from childhood. She used to play it with her brothers, her sisters. Even in America they played it. Even with her younger cousins Dorothy was always the first to look away, her concentration broken by some comic shame. This time, though, it was Yellin who looked away. He stifled a giggle. “Jesus, Dorothy,” he said.

  “No, Milton, I mean it. How do you get those machines? What do you have to pay for them to give them to you?”

  “Theah delez plays,” Yellin mumbled.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  “They’re dealer’s plates.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, “that’s because you think there ought to be some sort of statute of limitations on trying to stay alive,” he said malevolently.

  “No,” said Mrs. Bliss, “no.”

  “Bullshit,” Yellin growled. “I tell them I’m opening a business to take seniors on tours off the beaten track, rides in the sand, into the woods. Land cruises. That I put them in all-terrain vehicles on forks in the road. It’s a terrific idea. They all think so. And it is. Just what we came across today, for example. We’d do a land-office business. We’d clean up. I tell them I just have to take it out for a spin. Safety factors. Official vehicular approval ratings.”

  “They fall for this?”

  “I’m a heartbreaker, they eat it up. Half of them want to come in on the deal with me.”

  He was a heartbreaker, he really was, and he made her as breathless as he must have made Ted and all the other dupes and suckers who’d ever had dealings (the dealers) with him. It occurred to her as he ran through his wild defenses that she was not properly dressed
for him, that she should have worn the garments of Saharan nomads; that she had made a mistake not to sport gleaming robes, complicated headgear; or to have rubbed heavy sunblock into every pore like a minstrel. That he gave off a sort of cancer, had power to kindle headaches, to dehydrate the heart.

  She needed to get back to her apartment.

  “So soon?” he said mildly. She was astonished. He’d forgiven and forgotten.

  “No, really. I have to.”

  “Dorothy. Sweetheart. No one’s here. I’ll turn around, I’ll shut my eyes. Take off your bloomers and walk in the sea to your waist. Raise your dress, tinkle in the ocean.”

  It wasn’t his business. She was furious, but despite herself she told him she didn’t have to go. She didn’t. It was the old business of her bladder shutting down on her when she wasn’t near a familiar toilet. Ted had teased her about it in the old days. Even Alcibiades Chitral had questioned her when she’d visited him in the penitentiary. People thought she was too modest, a prude, ashamed, for all her vanity, the pride she’d once taken in her looks, in her body. It was probably true. Though it rolled off other people like water off a duck’s back, she may have been one of the last alive who hadn’t come to accept scandal. Who, though she watched with the same avidity as anyone else the morning TV shows, the mass public confessionals on which everyone—incesters, whores, cross-dressers, the sex changed, the housewives who stripped, fat admirers, klansmen, wife swappers, self-proclaimed thieves, rapists, child abusers, the murderers, the specialist serial killers—admitted to anything, still wanted to cover her eyes, her ears, who couldn’t have fantasized a fantasy if her life depended on it (even that Ted was still alive, even that Marvin was), and who wouldn’t for the world have gone on any of these shows to admit that she had ever had anything so intimate as a body, or that even if she had, it could have found itself on national TV owning up to anything as personal (and it was this, not their standards and practices, that scandalized her) as a function or a need.

  It was remarkable to Mrs. Ted Bliss that the whole world did not seize up when it was out of range of a toilet.

  And she didn’t care to hear any mishegoss about repression, thank you very much. No. If she wanted no part of Junior Yellin right then it was because he embarrassed her. His remark about peeing in the ocean was the least of it. It wasn’t any one thing. His plans for a museum, what he’d said to the dealers, all the silly, heartbreaking highwire of which he was not only capable but proud, even the fatuity about the superiority of his metal detector, the baloney about the “spot” he was looking for, his crap about the demographics—all his crap. It was amazing, a revelation. She had perhaps at last met a man (taking nothing away from the natural gifts and bona fides of his manhood) whom she couldn’t entirely trust.

  But she was his last connection to earth, the life he’d known before he’d become such a caricature of himself. How could she tell him goodbye and good luck, how could she write him off?

  Because, sadly, the truth was that if she was his last connection to earth, he was pretty much hers, as well. Maxine, thank God, lived; Frank, whatever his new, changed circumstances, did. George, Judith, and James; Ellen and Barry; Janet and Donny and all of them, thank God. But there was no getting away from it. She was at an age where distance and separation had been transformed into something more important than memory. Or, if not memory (she was too old to tell herself lies), then at least involvement, hands-on concern, the simple day-to-day of all her maternals and sororals and familials down past the most distant cousin to the last of her mathematically attenuate mishpocheh.

  She loved them. In some platonic piece of her heart they loomed larger than nations, than civilization itself. It wasn’t a case of out-of-sight out-of-mind. It was much more complicated. As complicated as distance. She was old. She had her health but she was old, and it would have been as difficult for her, as much of a mental and physical impossibility and strain, to bear down on them, on their collective griefs and individual concerns, with the brute force of her concentration as it would have been for her to catch a rubber pelota in the clawlike cesta at the jai alai to send it flying back at the wall, or run after the rabbit at the dog track.

  She still spoke to them regularly on the long distance, but the truth was she spent more time idly chatting with Louise Munez at her high-security kiosk and newsstand than with all her children and grandchildren and relatives combined.

  No, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, though she wouldn’t go in with him on his schemes, she couldn’t abandon Yellin. No more than she could have stopped putting through calls to her children, or taking them either. But, face it, she was pulling in her horns almost as deliberately as she was just now taking up her tools and substandard, unbelled, whistleless metal detector and starting off in the direction of the ridiculous dune buggy for the long ride home under the unrelenting sun.

  ELEVEN

  Mrs. Ted Bliss’s daughter-in-law Ellen had used her two-week vacation from the shoe store to come down to visit from Chicago.

  Typical, Mrs. Bliss thought, the woman didn’t even wait to be invited, just picked up the phone one night to announce when she’d be arriving. She wanted, she said, to treat Dorothy to lunch. Were there any particularly good health-food restaurants her mother-in-law had not been to?

  “I haven’t been to any,” Dorothy said. “When I eat out, I eat out. I don’t go for a treatment.”

  “Oh, Ma,” Ellen said lightly, “what am I going to do with you? Never mind, I’ll ask Wilcox. He’ll know a place.”

  Wilcox was Dr. Wilcox, Ellen’s holistic chiropractor. His practice was in Houston, Texas, and three times a year Ellen flew there to be adjusted and to find out what was new in the New Age.

  Because the truth was Mrs. Bliss had a blind spot when it came to the question of her problematic daughter-in-law. Though she knew better, she still held something of a grudge against her son’s widow. After all—she knew she was being ridiculous—Marvin had died on the woman’s watch. This was before all the mishegoss of the herbal teas and honey; the wheatless, flourless breads and leaf jams; the baked soybean stand-ins for meat and the vegetable compote dessert substitutes. It was before all the noxious, mysterious beverages she had learned to mix in her blender, before all her long, awful witness of her husband’s horribly drawn-out death. In fairness, though, it was only tit for tat. Because on Ellen’s side, too, wasn’t there the same unspoken accusation? If Marvin had died on his wife’s watch, hadn’t he also died on his mother’s? Of course, neither of them ever mentioned to the other their vague mutual suspicions. Though they screamed at each other plenty and, behind one another’s backs, passed remarks, Ellen finding fault with her mother-in-law’s stolid Russian reluctance to consider other options, or color outside the lines of her character, and Mrs. Bliss resenting her daughter-in-law’s resentment, her unyielding attempts to look for miracles, stubborn as a cultist or orthodox. Did she think Wilcox some magician who could push back the borders of death, protect her with elixirs and potions? (And wasn’t Janet still in India? India, noch! Why not Oz?) That having surrendered poor Marvin to death at the hands of the doctors (who had failed her only after Marvin died), she could so arrange things with her diets and ointments and fancy Houston, Texas, backrubs and spells that no one would ever have to die again.

  It wasn’t the first time Ellen had visited Dorothy on a moment’s notice, and, though the women didn’t get along well, didn’t for that matter even like each other much, for Marvin’s sake neither wished to call it quits. Mrs. Bliss even had a grudging admiration for her son’s wife. It was, in an odd way, a little like the esteem in which she held men. After her husband died, Ellen had become astonishingly independent. With no Manny in her life to give her widow tips she’d gone on not only to raise two very sweet children but to become a genuinely first-class businesswoman. Salesperson of the Year eleven of the fourteen or fifteen years she’d been with Chandler’s Shoes on Randolph Street (the flagship of the big Chicago chain), s
he had won giant, bigscreen television sets, state-of-the-art computers, all-expense-paid trips to London and Cancun, grand prizes of every description. One particularly good year they had presented her with five thousand dollars’ worth of company stock.

  But then she remembered Providence, the seder at Frank’s. Her son had paid for Ellen’s airplane tickets, for Barry’s. Why had she let him? Mrs. Bliss wasn’t one to wonder what this one or that one did or did not have in the bank, but she knew damn well that her daughter-in-law could afford to buy her own airline tickets, Barry’s, too. Why did she make herself out to be such a chozzer?

  Though, of course, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, that wasn’t putting the case accurately. Anyway, Mrs. Bliss didn’t really believe Ellen’s greed had anything to do with money. It was greed of a baser sort. It was oy vay iz mir greed, poor-me greed, the greed of insistent vulnerability and grudge, the pressed, put-upon passion of complaint—a greed that lived by its own jealous counsel and kept its own sharp accounts, bookkeeping loss like an underwriter. It was almost, had Mrs. Bliss understood the complicated laws of the lines of succession, a sort of royalty by remove. Thus Ellen (according to Ellen according to Mrs. Ted Bliss) would always qualify as Marvin’s chief mourner, outranking Maxine who had merely been his little sister and had a good, living, faithful husband, and a beautiful daughter (Judith), and entrepreneurial James; and Frank, the baby of the outfit, but the one who published books and had celebrity and whose son, Donny, was the richest and smartest of the bunch. If she had competition about who had taken the heaviest hit it had to be, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss, Mrs. Ted Bliss herself. And Dorothy she’d have written off because though Dorothy had lost her son and her husband, too, at least had had the husband long enough to see most of her children married and to have grandchildren. Also, Ellen’s son, Barry, though a kind and gentle man, was a lightweight, and Janet, her daughter, a lost, almost middle-aged spinster, was in India, searching for her life in a place she’d never been where she could ever conceivably have lost it. These were the reasons she took airfare from Frank, and fought like cats and dogs with Dorothy.